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sub.club Emerges to Offer Paid Fediverse Subscriptions
(wedistribute.org)
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
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@deadsuperhero @fediverse
Why did't you mention Mitra, the open source and fully decentralized Fediverse service that also offers paid subscriptions, and which has been around for several years?
Probably because, to my knowledge:
I'm not trying to slight Mitra in any way, shape, or form, but my focus for this article was scoped to one thing in particular.
@deadsuperhero @fediverse You cite an abandoned project and withdrawn WebMonetization FEP and then say "most efforts have not advanced beyond the planning stages". This statement is misleading because those planning stages are far behind us. Mitra had subscriptions since 2022 and there are other projects that provide monetization options, like PeerTube Lightning plugin and PeerTube Premium Users plugin. FEP-0ea0 and FEP-0837 were published and implemented. Your co-author @quillmatiq should be well aware of these developments because we talked about it
@silverpill I'm not a co-author of this article. I contribute to WD but did not contribute to this article as it would be a conflict of interest irt my relationship with the project.
Share your info with kindness instead of anger. We're all trying to educate and build together, and good-faith conversations go a lot further than assuming the worst of everyone.
Sean has never written a piece with the intent to erase history, and he works incredibly hard to keep things accurate.
@quillmatiq
https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/activitypub-nomadic-identity/
In another article @deadsuperhero talked about nomadic identity and Mike Macgirvin's efforts to implement it in ActivityPub, but similarly failed to mention another project that implements it (Mitra) and the person who wrote the spec (me).
At least my work was mentioned in a footnote. In the current article it is completely ignored.
@deadsuperhero @fediverse
Dude, listen. I am one person running a volunteer news project for free. I try my best to stay on top of researching the space, but there's no reasonable way for me to catch everything. I've written 200+ articles at this point, but due to a combination of factors, I struggle to get more than one article out per week at times. I regularly juggle a backlog of 40+ drafts at any given moment. Add a dash of burnout and fatigue, and you'll start to get a clearer picture: it's hard to keep up, and only getting harder.
There's no way for me to reasonably catch everything. Mitra's a cool project and all, but it's tiny enough that I've heard relatively little about it. There are dozens of projects out there at this point, and new ones everyday. If you're not advertising the thing you're building and what it does, there's a high chance I might miss it.
I keep an eye on the FEP developments from time to time, and I applaud all you've accomplished with that. However, the existence of a spec does not necessarily mean that platforms out there are necessarily implementing each and every one of them.
@deadsuperhero @fediverse FEP-ef61 is what Mike was implementing and rolled out in production this summer. It's not like we didn't advertise that. All work on this FEP (and ones that precede it) was done in public channels, it's really hard to miss if you're interested in nomadic identity.
Give @weekinfediverse a follow. It provides a concise summary of what is happening in Fediverse
@silverpill @fediverse @deadsuperhero @weekinfediverse I am interested if sub.club and mitra subs are compatible.
@sun @fediverse @deadsuperhero Not yet. But Mitra can display a "Subscribe" button and subscription terms for sub.club accounts if they start publishing a
Proposal
object as described in FEP-0837. Alternatively, I can add support for their customsubscription
propertyMost efforts haven't moved beyond the planning stages. Just because you can point to a plugin or a FEP spec doesn't mean that it's an ongoing active effort for bring a payment layer to the Fediverse, with a consumer-facing tool or platform. I'm sorry if I didn't catch that Mitra had some of that functionality, but I would also push back and say that the average person is not going to use Monero for payments on the Web anytime soon.
Those PeerTube plugins are nice, and the Premium Users one was actually something I pointed @quillmatiq@mastodon.social to for sub.club, as an example of prior art. They're interesting experiments, possibly useful integrations, but not in and of themselves actual platforms to build infrastructure and solutions on.
@deadsuperhero @fediverse @quillmatiq Protocols described in these FEPs are currency-agnostic and developers can build actual platforms and solutions on them (as I did). This is the only ongoing effort to bring a payment layer to the Fediverse - there are no alternative proposals. FEP-8c3f was withdrawn in favor of FEP-0ea0.
Okay, you didn't know about it. But now you do and it would be nice to include at least some of that information in the article.